Cory Barr

Interactive Installation Art and Design

I'm an interactive new-media artist, designer, and engineer. I focus on incorporating interactive techologies into designs for public spaces, museums, and progressive companies. My main mediums are light and motion-sensing tools.

Projects

In collaboration with Digital Ambiance, I designed and implemented generative lighting animations for their cutting-edge downtown playground plaza. Each evening, the lights display a non-repeating animation pattern based on flowing patterns of the San Joaquin River. Each umbrella will bloom into color bursts as visitors move underneath them.

In collaboration with LEVYdance and Garance Marneur, "Comfort Zone" is a large interactive room initially designed for The Exploratorium. It asks the question of how comfortable are strangers in a space when prompted to collaborate with other visitors. It uses computer vision and motion tracking to create an immersive enviroment that encourages participants to interact with their shadow-avatars, other participants, as well as pre-recorded sequences of the dance troupe LEVYDance.

Urban Heat

A collaboration with Sebastian Martin, Urban Heat makes the invisibile visible by letting visitors to The Exploratorium see the heat signatures of San Francisco's Embarcadero and its visitors. Vistors can interactively explore and compare the temperature of different elements and see how they change across the day.

This piece translates the outline of your body into watercolor-like points to digitally paint with. The "paint" will occasionally "blow" to the left or to the right. Physical fans blow the air to sync with the animations.

This piece lets you play with sand. As you dig into the sand, rivers and lakes form. As you pile the sand high, mountains emerage passing through rocky terrain on into peaks of snow. Animals inhabit the landscape. Flags, trees, and other objects sometimes appear. (Note: the material actually isn't sand. It's "fake snow.")

In this piece, participants throw foam rocks at a virtual wall. Shattering the wall advances the video or slideshow. Its first appearance was to enhance California Academy of Science's "Rock Night," and used geological images.

This installation is a portable interactive floor that animates fire, colored water, and other effects as you walk through it. Participants can tweet customizable words to have the floor respond, and the animations can be tailored for individual appearances.

This piece was commission by a security firm for display on a 100-inch monitor in their corporate lobby. It uses real-time, though somewhat anonymized data. (Data in this video is spoofed due to the client's wishes.)

From a series of monochromatic generative pieces designed to grow complex visuals from simple, understandable rules. Dots spin around a center. An evolving mandala-inspired shape evolves as each dots draws a line to its concentric neighbor. The angle of the line determines the shade of the line.

This piece grows mandala-inspired shapes by visualing the rules people that the planetary orbits obeyed during the time of Ptolemy. Seven circles (one for each then-known planet) spin in epicycles. These epicycles are circles within circles that Ptolemy thought accounted for the deviations from circular motion in the night sky. From a series of monochromatic generative pieces designed to grow complex visuals from simple, understandable rules.